Locals frustrated over Israeli strike that has spilled over to U.S.

Every day, Hani Cohen-Dinetz calls the Consulate General of Israel's office. She's desperate to get her teenage daughter a passport so she can visit Israel on a school trip.

But every day, it's the same thing: The office is still closed.

With every call "I'm hoping the answering machine gives a different message," said Cohen-Dinetz, of Aventura. But nobody will get on the phone: "You can't talk to anyone."

Israel's Foreign Ministry is on strike, and it has shut down its 106 consulates and embassies around the world. There's no end in sight for the strike which has intensified in the past four months.

For more than a month, the strike has shut off services for the general public.

The Israeli consulate in Miami is home base for 50,000 to 80,000 Israelis in Florida and Puerto Rico and serves about 12,500 local people each year, a spokesman said this week.

The reason for the strike is this: Government employees stationed abroad have complained about their salaries, saying they need to dip into their personal savings to subsidize their living expenses. Those employees pay the most taxes in Israel.

They also complain about the loss of pension benefits to their spouses who must leave their jobs to relocate.

The strike first began in March with limited communication with Jerusalem, said Chaim Shacham, the Miami-based Israeli consul general for Florida and Puerto Rico.

When the general public was cut off in June, exceptions were made for medical emergencies, transporting bodies for burial and adoption and surrogacy issues.

Everyone else, including Israelis stuck abroad because they have lost their passports, is stuck. People in countries that require visas to go to Israel, such as Venezuela and Romania, are out of luck.

Jews moving to Israel — a religious and cultural concept known as "aliyah" — have also run into bureaucratic issues.

"It's definitely making it harder, people are trying to work behind the scenes," said Yael Katsman, spokeswoman for Nefesh B'Nefesh, an organization founded in Boca Raton that provides assistance for Americans and Canadians to make aliyah. In 11 years, the agency has assisted 35,000 immigrants, with the most recent charter flight from New York with 231 people last week.

"Instead of people officially finishing all their paperwork before they move to Israel, very often they will do it from" Israel, she said. "The strike is making the process more challenging for our organization."

And people like Cohen-Dinetz, of Aventura, are left with few options.

Her daughter, Arielle, 16, attends a private Jewish school in New York, and her class is planning to go to Israel and Poland for three months. But although Arielle was born in New York and is an American citizen, Cohen-Dinetz is Israeli. That means Israel requires her daughter to also have an Israeli passport.

But there is no consulate willing or able to process the paperwork.

"It's very aggravating," Cohen-Dinetz said. "It's too long now, it's more than a month, it's not fair to us, it should stop. It's very stressful."